The news already hit HackerNews late last night, but at that time there was no confirmation so I decided to wait until we knew for sure. Well, after Dennis Ritchie and Steve Jobs, the technology world lost another great mind yesterday. Stanford has confirmed that John McCarthy, the creator of LISP and the father of artificial intelligence, has passed away, age 84.

None of those non-AI languages are as powerful as Lisp, actually Haskell is a purely functional language that is primarily focused towards improving applied type theory and automated theorem proving, Erlang is primarily focused on fault-tolerance, and Scala is many focused on JVM scripting.

None of these systems are as powerful as Lisp because Lisp is focused on creating AI, rather then solving specific programming problems. I do not mean to imply that Lisp is better then any of these languages, those languages are fantastic in their own domains, however, they do not have the power of adapting to any domain of your choosing, which is present in Lisp. See Of Lisp Macros and Washing Machines for more.